How Pot Legalization Makes It Harder for Police to Violate Your Civil Rights

Marijuana is an invaluable tool for law enforcement in America—but only so long as cannabis remains illegal, which is exactly what most law-enforcement lobbies and pro-police lawmakers want.

Under prohibition, cannabis is an incomparable catch-all excuse. The mere whiff of cannabis is sufficient probable cause for a traffic stop or, where the police-state tactic is still accepted, start a stop-and-frisk routine.

“After marijuana use was legalized, Colorado and Washington saw dramatic drops in search rates,” the report’s authors wrote. “That’s because many searches are drug-related. Take away marijuana as a crime and searches go down.”

As the Washington Post’s Wonkblog reported, the data includes “traffic searches initiated for any reason, but excludes searches following an arrest.” Meaning, it’s a good indication of what cops do when there’s not necessarily a clear indication of a crime being committed—and it’s proof positive that marijuana, the world’s most common illicit drug (where it’s still illegal, at least), is also deeply ingrained in police tactics.

This means marijuana legalization—a common-sense move we wholeheartedly advocate, for obvious reasons—has serious implications for communities of color who disproportionately suffer violent encounters with law enforcement.

The data does have some limitations, as the Marshall Project pointed out: It analyzes only data from state police agencies, including the California Highway Patrol, whose main roles are enforcing the law on highways, and not local police agencies who would be responsible for law enforcement in cities like Denver and Seattle, where most of both states’ black population is concentrated.

And as the data reveals, although stops-and-searches of black and Latino drivers dropped significantly after marijuana was legalized in Colorado and Washington in 2012, obvious and outrageous racial biases remain.

In Colorado, black and Latino drivers are still almost three times as likely as to be stopped and searched as whites. In Washington, black and white motorists briefly achieved parity in 2014.

And while the data is a potent argument for marijuana legalization as a crucial element of sweeping criminal-justice reform—all of which is at serious risk in the Trump era under Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s Justice Department—the Marshall Project also suggests that legalization is not as an effective deterrent with local police.

They tell the tale of 33-year old Ryan Brown, an Iraq war veteran pulled over by police a block from his home in 2015. Brown, who was never charged with a crime, won a $212,000 settlement after he was pulled from his car without being given a clear reason.

Later, the police, who to this day claim they acted properly, said that Brown was stopped because he lived in a high-crime area—a common excuse easily deployed in any urban area.

At the same time, as Brown’s situation demonstrates, stops with no probable cause can result in ramifications, including monetary settlements, for police. And as the data shows, removing marijuana from criminal statutes would affect a profound change in police tactics and attitudes—meaning, in case it wasn’t already obvious, that cannabis legalization is a civil-rights and social-justice issue that touches people who would never consider smoking a joint.